Thorny and terrifying memories

The knock-out roses were an exception; they grew, and grew, well last year.  They look best when periodically cut back anyways, but this is not one of TPP's favorite gardening chores.  It conjures up some painful memories. In some minor way this is like the opening scene of Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen awakens in a bad way to discover that his nightmare of hearing helicopter blades whumping the air were actually the blades of a ceiling fan, but it didn't matter because he was back in Saigon anyways.  So you lop off a two foot section of the rose bush, and you try to throw the branch to the side, but it's thorns cling to your gloves.  You try to get a new grip, but now the branch has reached over your shoulder and grabbed your shirt, and no matter which way to pull, you still are getting grabbed by your shirt sleeve. So it goes, branch after branch, thorns tugging at your clothes and ripping any exposed skin.  Then the memories come flooding back of rattan palms in the dim understory of Queensland's rain forests.  These palms climb by means of grappling hooks, recurved spines on three sides of long, whip-like modified shoots

 with the tensile strength of piano wire, and they extend across your path as if waiting to garrot the next field biologist who happens along.  There were three species of three different sizes that TPP fondly named "rip your ankle off", "rip your leg off", and "rip you head off".  As soon as you were grappled, you had to stop, immediately, reach around with a pair of pruning shears, and cut the shoot.  With the tension relieved it would usually fall off; just never try to pull away.  This gets tricky when grabbed from different sides all at once.  Locally they are called "lawyer canes" because once they get their hooks into you, .....   With the ravages of the rattans, field gear just got shreaded.  You just keep on working, branch by branch, shrub by shrub, until the bloody roses are pruned.  Then you get a margarita to help the scary memories subside.  Maybe the roses won't grow so well this year; maybe the next pruning won't be so bad.  Maybe the war won't so be horrible this tour.  And the nightmares start again.

Discovering something I didn't know?

One thing about being an academic, you constantly learn new things.  While scanning through a number of science news web sites during lunch, there was an article on the Discover Magazine web site called 20 things you didn't know about deserts.  Nothing wrong with learning a thing or three or 20 about deserts.  This is something like #3 on the list: "If you get lost in the desert, .... You can suck water from the branches of some palms, such as buri and rattan."  Wow!  What a thing to know. A real survival hint from the we-know-20-things-about-deserts-that-you-don't experts at Discover Magazine.  Well, the Phactor is going to tell you one thing that Discover Magazine doesn't know about deserts: those palms don't grow in deserts; both are native to the wet tropical areas of SE Asia-Australasia!  Duh!  Guys, that's like saying if you get lost in the desert, stop in at the first DQ you come to and get a root beer float.  They're both just about equally possible to do.  Rattan palms are actually climbing palms, lianas of a sort, so they live in forests, not deserts.  Although you can drink water from a section of rattan stem, but you're not going to find one where you need one.  Rattans do not twine; rattans climb by means of grapples, modified inflorescences, long whip-like, wiry, and armed with tough recurved  hooks that make barbed wire look friendly.  In the dim light of a rain forest understory, these long thin rattan grapples wait ready to rip asunder any unwary botanical field worker.  Did TPP mention that he does not think of  rattans fondly?  So most assuredly, rattan palms are not going to be your problem if lost in a desert, however you will probably die of thirst. 

Rattan palms

Has the Phactor ever told you about rattan palms? Probably not because they bring such painful memories to mind. Rattan palms are scandent vines which means that they climb by sort of draping themselves over other plants; they don't twine. The pain comes from the extremely spiny stems (actually spiny leaf bases sheathing the stem) and the modified inflorescences, long, thin whips constituted out of piano wire, armed with recurved fish hooks along its length (visible in the upper right of this image), a perfect structure for garroting unsuspecting botanists in the dim understory of rain forests. To move through some of my study sites required you to have a pair of pruning shears in hand constantly to clip yourself free of these restraints. Still you and your clothes got shreaded. The palms climb by grappling tree bark or other structures and the weight of the palm sets the hooks. These memories were awakened by a request to review a manuscript on the reproduction of rattan palms. So the Phactor is quite sympathetic about what the authors put up with to conduct their research. Such nostagia erupts about rattans when ever the Phactor happens to sit upon someone's patio furniture made from rattan palm stems.